My First News Item
My Nine News ItemA Mother And Her Two Daughters Were Brutally Murdered..
It was the crime that shocked America. On a summer night in 2007, a mother and her two daughters were brutally murdered by a pair of callous petty criminals.
Joanna Hawke-Petit, 48, and her daughters Michaela, 11, and Hayley, 17, died at the hands of Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes.
Mrs. Hawke-Petit was raped and strangled, her daughters burned to death, and Michaela sexually assaulted. The only member of the family to survive was the little girl's father, William Petit.
On the night of the killings, Dr. Petit woke up on the sunroom couch to find himself bound and with two strange men looking down at him.
One was holding a 9mm gun, while the other carried a bloodstained Louisville Slugger baseball bat that he had used to beat Dr. Petit around the head.
His hands were bound tightly palm to palm with plastic ties cutting in the skin and his ankles bound so tight the bones cut into each other.
The attackers next bound Michaela and her 17-year-old sister, Hayley, to their beds, and in the morning, one of the intruders drove Hawke-Petit to a bank to withdraw money.
Hawke-Petit and the intruder then returned to the home, where the mother and her daughter were sexually assaulted. Hawke-Petit was strangled to death, according to testimony. Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes doused the home in gasoline and fled, The Associated Press reported. Hayley and Michaela died of smoke inhalation, according to testimony.
Down in the basement, Bill had no idea what was going on upstairs. 'His brain feels swollen and bruised.
Hours later, he heard his wife's voice coming from upstairs. It's muffled but it is kind.
D'Agostino writes: 'He is witnessing his wife, who must be petrified, having a conversation with two men who broke into their home and beat his skull with a bat.'
Mrs. Hawke-Petit is heard telling the intruders that she will need to get her checkbook before going to the bank. A while later he hears her calling his practice and saying he won't be in, he's ill.
The next sound is 'thump, thump, thump' coming from the living room. 'He can't bring himself to imagine that what he hears is the sound of his wife being raped on their living room floor,'
writes D'Agostino.
'Can't make himself think about what has happened to his two girls, his beautiful Michaela and Hayley'.
He heard a moan and yelled 'Hey'. A man responded, 'Don't worry. It's all going to be over in a couple of minutes.
Dr. Petit knew he had to get help.
Somehow, he said, he crawled, then rolled to a neighbor's house. Doctors said later Petit had lost as much as seven pints of blood. He said his neighbor didn't even recognize him at first because he was so bloody.
Captain Robert Vignola of the Cheshire Police Department had been at his desk when the call came in from dispatch that there was a hostage situation.
Mrs. Hawkes-Petit had tipped off the teller when she was withdrawing the $15,000 that she needed the money to save her family but the police must not be alerted or the intruders would kill them.
The teller went ahead and called the police when she left the bank. Ten minutes after receiving the call, Vignola did a drive-by.
He saw no activity, no lights, circled the block, and parked, keeping a line of sight to the house.
Another dispatcher told him they had the home phone number as well as all cell numbers for family members but Vignola ordered no one to call the house.
Vignola was ordering men to the woods behind the house, two police cars were within sight of the house and back-up was on the way.
But protocol kept them from moving in until he saw a suspect running from the Petits' house.
The perpetrators were in Jennifer's car and screaming down the driveway. They ended up crashing into two parked police cruisers that had set up a roadblock and were taken into custody.
Vignola then turned his head back to the Petit residence to see a large plume of smoke coming from the house.
Thomas Ullman, Chief Public Defender, cross-examined Vignola and wanted to know why no one even attempted to call.
'I advised them that I was going to wait a couple of minutes for a better inner perimeter, more people, for the safety rescue,' he told the court.
'Almost 20 minutes altogether where no phone call was ever made,' asked Ullman, 'from any police officer into the house?'
Meanwhile, Hayes and Komisarjevsky fled the scene in the Petit family car. They were immediately spotted by police surveillance, pursued, and arrested one block away after crashing into a police car. The home invasion had lasted seven hours.
Both Hayes and Komisarjevsky confessed to the murders. Detectives testified that Hayes smelled of gasoline throughout his interrogation. Each assailant claimed that the other was the driving force and mastermind behind the home invasion.
At the end of the court case, Komisarjevsky and Hayes were convicted of multiple counts of rape and murder and, in October 2011, sentenced to death.
The pair had their sentences effectively commuted to life imprisonment last month after Connecticut abolished the death penalty.
Dr. Petit criticized the decision, saying the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors had 'overstepped its powers' and failed to give due consideration to the 'emotional impact on the victims and their families.
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